Collateral Damage

Reading all the way to the end of Matthew 25

At the beginning of the Clinton administration, Vice President Al Gore was charged with heading up a task force to Reinvent Government. By September of 1992, Gore presented the outlines of the plan to improve technological capacity, focus on customer service, and lessen needless regulations. This retrospective looking back from 30 years is interesting.

But then I’m a policy wonk. I even read the book that came out of the project in 1992. There are some reasonable critiques I could offer. Decreasing what the retrospective calls “the adversarial relationship between business and government agencies” may have gone a bit too far. Technological improvements that were great in 1992 don’t stand up as well in the Internet age.

At the very least, there’s a lesson here about continuous process improvement. Maybe there should even be a cabinet post with that charge. But tackling reform every 30 years doesn’t seem effective. One of the key issues today is that it was difficult for agencies to spend the money necessary for ongoing technological improvements, which is why the DOGE boys are stumped by COBOL.

Where Gore and his team developed their plans over eight months and then put together implementing legislation passed by Congress, what we have seen in the last eight weeks has been ramshackle at best and often capricious and vindictive. We have witnessed sudden, arbitrary changes consistent with a “move fast and break things” mentality. Moves are made of questionable legality followed by rhetorical attacks on judges pointing out how things are supposed to be done.

But it is not just systems that are disrupted. It’s people.

And somehow the administration acts as if a little disruption to individuals or groups is worth the pursuit of their Grand Goals spelled out in Project 2025 or on Truth Social. Cabinet secretaries interviewed in the media have been forthright about this point.

Let me offer some examples of the collateral damage that results.

Over the weekend the Seattle Times had a story about Ned Johnson, who was a social security recipient. In February, the Social Security administration notified his bank that he had died in November and removed his social security check from his bank account. After unsuccessful calls to the agency, he went to the local social security office.

In a huff, he went to the office on the ninth floor of the Henry Jackson Federal Building downtown. It’s one of the buildings proposed to be closed under what the AP called “a frenetic and error-riddled push by Elon Musk’s budget-cutting advisers.”

It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.

“They are so understaffed down there,” he said. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”

After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”

Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.

It’s almost guaranteed that there will be other suddenly-dead Neds out there. Many of them will not have the gumption he had to fight back.

Then there are the issues with immigration enforcement. NBC reported last week that the child of undocumented immigrants, born in the United States and so a citizen (the courts have stopped Trump’s 14th amendment plans), was sent to Mexico along with her parents when they were stopped at an immigration checkpoint. They were on their way to her treatment for the brain cancer she suffers from.

Another immigration issue involves identifying those who are members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. This is the heart of the legal drama that unfolded Saturday and continues this afternoon. The Trump administration rounded up Venezuelans (some on Temporary Protected Status), put them on airplanes, and flew them to El Salvador to be imprisoned there. They used the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as justification. But some of those accused on belonging to TdA simply had tattoos that were reminiscent of those that the gang prefers. The New York Times reports on one such case:

Ms. Casique said her son had no gang affiliation and had entered the United States to seek asylum in late 2023, after several years spent working in Peru to support his family back home. During his journey north, he was injured in Mexico when he fell from a train, she said.

Mr. García, who had turned himself over to the authorities at the U.S. border, was detained at a routine appearance before immigration officers last year after they spotted his tattoos, Ms. Casique said.

The tattoos, which she says include a crown with the word “peace” in Spanish and the names of his mother, grandmother and sisters, led the authorities to place Mr. García under investigation and label him as a suspected member of Tren de Aragua, according to Ms. Casique.

In higher education, the administration’s actions are creating uncertainty and no small measure of chaos. The clearest example involves actions taken against Columbia University, home of the most visible of the protests opposing the war in Gaza. As Inside Higher Ed wrote this morning, this began with a $400 million dollar freeze on grants to the university and now has expanded to include putting a department “in receivership”, and demanding changes in discipline processes.

Even if the administration’s antisemitism claims are taken at face value (which they shouldn’t be), these are draconian steps. People will lose jobs, grad students will lose their research grants, staff support will be eliminated, and summer research grants will end. That’s to say nothing of the downstream impacts of the planned research not going forward.

And then there are stories of potential harms. They aren’t here yet, but the actions taken to date raise the very real possibilities of problems going forward. Joyce Vance wrote about the horrendous storms that ran through much of the nation over the weekend. The latest toll I saw was 34 dead from a range of tornadoes, windstorms, and fire. She noted that staff at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are being cut and that the continuation of the agency is at risk.

One of the things NOAA provides is detailed warnings of approaching storms. The Trump administration and other conservatives have long favored privatizing the weather service to something like AccuWeather. Michael Lewis documented this well in his book on career government employees and why they are important. Joyce Vance writes:

Cuts that sound like a good idea to Elon Musk and Donald Trump have real impacts on the rest of us. That is only just beginning to dawn on people, who I’m sure you’re hearing, like I am, saying, “But I didn’t vote for this.” Trump 2.0, as I’ve written previously, isn’t a pick-your-own-adventure experience. You go to the carnival, you get all of the rides.

We were fortunate last night. Everyone in our house (chickens included) is okay, we just have a little cleanup to do. But so many people weren’t that lucky. They lost houses and lives. They will need support from FEMA and other federal services. If DOGE continues its romp through essential federal work that we, as taxpayers, fund and rely on, it’s only going to get worse.

Today, Jeralynne told me about this New York Times story involving people responsible for the managing the nuclear safety.

They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.

A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines.

And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.

In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.

There is nothing that prevented the Trump administration from taking their time on government restructuring efforts. There is nothing that prevented them from making proposals to Congress (especially with majorities in both houses). They just didn’t want to.

Far better in their eyes to act quickly and boldly no matter who gets hurt. They can argue that there is a new sheriff in town and it doesn’t matter who is hit by the fallout (hopefully not from my last example!). The utter disregard of the downstream pain demonstrates what the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has argued for years: “The Cruelty Is the Point”.

Here is one more horrific example. Last week, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristoff explored the impact of the USAID cuts. He starts his piece like this:

As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”

That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.

I have friends who are involved in international humanitarian efforts. In social media post, they are reporting the same fears of coming hardship, illness, and death. And to what end?

My mind goes to the goats in Matthew 25. We like to quote the early part of that passage. But Jesus repeats his “least of these comments” in the negative in verses 42-45:

⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’